City Planners have always been concerned about the sustainability of urban development, which is full of concrete buildings, air-conditioners, roads and road traffic but deprived of trees and gardens to give a balance to the built-up environment. The well-known phenomenon of an “urban heat sink” describes the growing increase in environmental temperature of cities over its surrounding areas.
Traditionally, multi-storey buildings were built with maximum saleable “private” space with little or no communal space for greenery. In recent years, some buildings incorporate small pockets of sky terraces with greenery in apartments or commercial buildings. A sky terrace is defined as a communal or landscaping area within a multi-storey building that must be accessible from common areas. An “effective area” is defined as the floor area covered under a 45 degree line from the top of an open perimeter wall that allows sunlight through. Only such area is considered a sky terrace.
For greenery to grow effectively, the sky terraces should be built to a height of around 5 meters or more with as much of its perimeter walls open. As habitable units are normally 3.3 meters in height, a two-storey void would need to be set aside for each sky terrace. Repeating these two conditions of design into several sky terraces and achieving modularity of the habitable units poses a great challenge for designers. Accordingly, buildings are now built with one or two mid level sky terraces and the sky terraces are confined to limited deck space.
In view of the foregoing, it is desirable to provide a multi-storey building that can allow each habitable unit access to a sky terrace(s) and increase the percentage of open perimeter walls, while achieving modularity of the habitable units.